Boost Sales this Holiday Season using MuleSoft
Written by Harini Krish
Lead Technical Content Writer
There is no greater test of the conjunction of consumers and technology than Black Friday, which is the beginning of the holiday shopping season. An incomparable opportunity to appeal to customers across a widespread variety of incentives, Black Friday is the ground evidence for large enterprises that have undertaken massive customer service upgrades.
If you are an investor at an eCommerce shop, the anxiety of lights-out this holiday season be reason enough to be losing sleep. And with the holiday season drawing close, one common worry that technology stakeholders bear in mind is whether their systems will be able to withstand the high volume transaction over an extended period of time – the critical focus being on the APIs since APIs are expected to be the magic element that keeps the business going which is the performant layer in the mix, responsible for maintaining the transactions across, making sure that transaction does not get dropped.
While reliability is an important topic, the endurance of the APIs is yet another thing that must be tested up-front. Enterprises need to start planning the endurance test cycles ahead of time.
Peak shopping holidays serve as a major test for every company’s IT infrastructure. According to ChannelAdvisor, a retailer whose IT infrastructure fails during Peak shopping holidays could lose an estimated 8% of the day’s sales for every hour.
To prepare for these high-volume holidays well, businesses must ensure that their IT infrastructure can handle millions of transactions and offer a real-time, omnichannel experience that creates a personalized customer shopping journey.
Here are some strategies for improving customer experience, exceeding sales, and how Royal Cyber can help put these strategies into action.
Build an IT Infrastructure that is Performant, Scalable, and Resistant to Failure
One of the utmost important goals of peak holidays is ensuring meeting SLA’s, performance, and uptime. During Black Friday, we have seen, 1 in 5 retail websites crashed before 9 AM. During such circumstances, website crashes and downtime can lead to loss of revenue and impact customer loyalty.
In order to mitigate downtime and crashes, businesses going into shopping periods must build an IT infrastructure resilient to catastrophes by guaranteeing:
Scalability – The ability to scale in response to customer and market shifts allows organizations to be flexible to accommodate customers' needs.
Performance – A high performant IT infrastructure is basically tied to stronger security, higher uptime, and better load balancing for a better customer experience.
Sustain 360-degree Customer Views and Omnichannel Experiences
During peak shopping days, every business’s actual 360-degree customer view will be tested heavily, specifically because customers will continuously switch various channels at a higher rate and frequency than off-peak periods.
The companies will need to guarantee that they sustain a single view of their customers and deliver a personalized, consistent omnichannel experience, whether it is on mobile, web, or in stores.
Produce IT Playbooks for Possible Scenarios
IT needs to create a comprehensive playbook for the peak holiday shopping season that sketches the possible scenarios. These playbooks must be fashioned together with business teams, partners, vendors, and customers to ensure that all stakeholders are connected to take the necessary steps when challenges arise.
The last step in the digital transformation journey for retailers is how API-led connectivity can help future-proof your enterprise - how to make your business successful for not only the current retail environment but for years to come.
At Royal Cyber, we value the importance of having continued support and service, which is why our support team offers deep MuleSoft expertise for every customer––eliminating the need for unnecessary escalations.
MuleSoft AnyPoint Platform is the chosen API to:
- Provide consistency across channels, including Cloud, Mobile and, Social, thus proactively addressing every customer engagement
- Be flexible and robust interfaces to integrate with internal, archaic/legacy applications.
- Offer and measure unmatched customer experiences, such as tracking and providing a consistent level of service when contacting the organization through different channels for the same issue to premier queues.
Royal Cyber with MuleSoft can help you add a little extra to every moment for your shoppers this holiday season to meet the historical demand. As we know, not all APIs are built the same and are made up of various building blocks and supporting libraries, so it is difficult to foresee the sources of memory leaks and not identify any particular component to be the fault source. Also, Mule is supported by so many libraries; at times, it may be the case that a mixture of several things is contributing to a leak at times.
And that is where, with all the right tools in place and with the right planning, it is possible to weed out any such issues in the early stages and help you spend some time in finding the best deals on Black Friday.
Prepare for a very different holiday season
While we do not have a crystal ball, our exclusive data from our global shoppers allows us to predict buyer trends. With careful planning and creative problem solving, businesses can use these themes to prepare for the approaching shopping season. The stakes have never been difficult this holiday season as the epidemic continues to disrupt the industry. Please check back with our MuleSoft experts for a more successful Holiday season as we get closer to the year's major shopping season. For more information, you can email us at [email protected] or visit www.royalcyber.com.
